For three months, K. Gupta was building a relationship with someone. Dates would turn into weekends, plans would spill into the following month. She had, as she puts it, “calendarised her life” around this person. “Then, one day, he disappeared,” she says. “No fight. No warning or explanation. Overnight, he went from 100 to zero,” Gupta recalls.
The 33-year-old Mumbai-based financial services professional wasn’t new to the vocabulary of modern dating. She knew what this was. She looked up its psychological effects online, read about dysregulation, about the specific cruelty of disappearance in a world where reaching someone takes seconds. She knew the word was “ghosting”. She just couldn’t bring herself to use it. “I had used the term lightly in the past,” says Gupta. “So when it happened to me, I couldn’t say it. It felt like too loose a term to describe how I was left feeling.”
Ghosting entered the slang lexicon roughly two decades ago—and was formally recognised by major dictionaries between 2015-17—to describe something painfully specific: disappearing after genuine emotional investment in a romantic context, leaving someone without explanation or closure. It named a cruelty the digital age had made newly possible. Before social media and messaging platforms, people could disappear and you genuinely didn’t know where they were. Digital life made absence visible. In a world of read receipts, last-seen timestamps, and the constant awareness of someone’s online presence, you know they’re there, putting up Insta stories, liking someone’s recent posts, reposting new reels, carrying on with life… just not responding to you. That’s what made the metaphor so apt. The person is still there, lingering like a ghost. Just that you could no longer see them in your life.
But the same technology that made ghosting possible also produced dozens of adjacent behaviours with no names of their own. The colleague who never replies on Slack. The collaborator who commits to a project, folds it into your plans, and then becomes unreachable. The therapy client who stops showing up maybe because they’re feeling better but don’t know how to say so. The first date who never texts again. These are not the same things, not emotionally, not morally, and certainly not in terms of what they rupture. Yet the word coined to name one specific emotional injury has become an umbrella term for all the ways people go MIA in digital life.
Pop culture has been trying to locate ghosting, too, in recent times. Filmmaker Adhiraj Bose’s debut play, The Ghost, co-written with Suchita Ranglani, follows a woman who kidnaps three men who had ghosted her in the past. First performed in Mumbai in January, “it’s partly an attempt to hold a mirror to how casual the exit has become,” says Bose, 34. He first heard the term six-seven years ago on a radio show. Since then, he has watched it migrate beyond dating into his own industry. “People will talk enthusiastically about doing a project with you over text, then disappear. You run into them at a screening and they go, ‘Oh, sorry, must have missed your text.’”
It may be one of digital life’s most useful inventions. The same platforms that make absence visible also make it easier to explain. Read receipts can be switched off. Notifications don’t always arrive. DMs slip into request folders or get buried under new ones. One of the men in The Ghost insists he never ghosted the woman at all. He had simply left her on “read”, meaning he opened her messages, let the blue ticks of the read receipt appear, and never replied.
“That ambiguity wasn’t just written into the play,” Bose says. It surfaced in the writers’ room too. Some writers felt leaving someone on “read” was worse than ghosting. Others felt it was better. “The disagreement eventually found its way into the script, left deliberately unresolved,” he adds. That the writers of an entire play about ghosting couldn’t agree on where the word begins or ends says something about where it has arrived.
In Off Campus, Amazon Prime’s adaptation of Elle Kennedy’s campus romance novels, college hockey player Garrett Graham is assigned a class presentation applying 19th century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard’s ideas to the modern phenomenon of ghosting. Graham takes the position that Kierkegaard would have considered ghosting immoral—an “abdication of selfhood, a choice of comfort over courage, a way of labelling someone unworthy by denying them an explanation”. It’s an interesting choice because Kierkegaard himself famously withdrew from his fiancée, Regine Olsen, for many months before ending their engagement in a letter. He was emotionally evasive in ways many people today would instinctively bracket under ghosting, even if it wasn’t ghosting in the true sense of the word.
If ghosting now seems to describe everything from a vanished fiancé to a colleague who never replied to your text, Naomi S. Baron isn’t particularly troubled by it. “Language rarely stands still,” says the professor emerita of linguistics at American University in Washington D.C. She explains how “cloud” once referred only to the thing in the sky before becoming remote storage. “Launch” moved from boats to products. “Spam” went from canned meat to unwanted email. Baron recently came across an online video from the US Postal Service, providing directions on how to continue receiving your mail when you change your address. The ending tagline was: “Don’t ghost your email. Get it forwarded.”
“My sense is that ‘ghosting’ will continue to be a word that is extended to new contexts. All will share the underlying meaning of ‘being ignored’,” she says. Baron thinks that except, perhaps, for some diehard users who post complaints about word change on Reddit, the vast majority of internet users won’t notice or care much about whether the term has expanded to other contexts. “I suspect that in seeing the message from the US Postal Service, they would simply laugh, as did I.”
MEANING vs FEELING
The language being fine is not the same thing as the people at the receiving end of it being fine though. Farah Maneckshaw, a counselling psychologist in Bengaluru, says the word has become too broad to capture what is happening psychologically. When someone disappears in the early stages of dating, before trust has had a chance to form, the hurt tends to turn inward. “Your wounds of feeling inadequate might become activated,” she says. “How did I not see this coming? What did I do wrong? The injury is largely to your sense of self.”
When someone disappears from an established relationship, however, “what gets ruptured is the sense of trust,” says Maneckshaw. “There’s an added layer of betrayal. It’s not just about you. It’s about your beliefs about the relationship itself.” Different experiences, different kinds of recovery, different processes of meaning-making. The word ghosting now carries all of them with equal lightness.
In India, she believes, ghosting may also be seen as a “culturally available exit strategy” to avoid the responsibility or guilt of hurting someone in a society where directness has rarely been the default. For many women, disappearing can often be the safer choice with the kind of aggressive responses they often receive in the face of rejection, she adds.
Then she offers another way of looking at the word itself. “We’ve kind of memefied ghosting now and I wonder if it’s made it easier to say, ‘I got ghosted,’ than to say, ‘I got rejected.’ It lands a bit softer. A little less vulnerable.” Words like rejection and abandonment carry so much weight, she points out, that maybe people are reaching past them for something lighter just to get the sentence out.
Gupta might be the exception then, since she felt the word wasn’t enough to contain her pain somehow. Maybe that is the paradox of ghosting.
The word has become broad enough for almost everyone to articulate what happened to them. And in doing so, perhaps too broad for some to describe how that felt.